Grow With Us

Don Polite

Chief Marketing Officer | Brand Transformation | Digital Innovation Strategic Partnerships | Johnson Controls | Warner Bros. | Abbott

Don Polite

About Don Polite

From being on Big Ten Men’s Basketball to Leading P&Ls ranging from $10M-$440M , Don Polite is a Marketing & Brand Transformation Executive with experience at Johnson Controls, Abbott, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Nestle across industrial, healthcare, sports and entertainment. Wan wide array of experiences and expertise in global brand strategy, brand transformation, digital innovation, strategic partnerships, key account management, licensing and buyer engagement, he has managed complex relationships at the C-suite level for multiple Fortune 500 companies, including United Healthcare, the NFL, ESPN/X-Games.

Questions

B2B SaaS Marketing continues to evolve and more closely resemble B2C Marketing. What can SaaS Marketing Teams learn from B2C & Entertainment Brands?

    B2B SaaS Marketing Teams should emulate B2C & Entertainment Brands by using data, analytics & machine learning/Ai to accurately target and market to potential customers with relevant, personalized content that addresses their specific paint points. Historically, B2B SaaS Marketing Organizations have not used data as a strategic resource and competitive advantage. Instead, they have driven their marketing efforts through rigid, sequential workflows. The focus has been on details like ensuring a phone call immediately follows an email or how to ensure a display ad follows a customer who opened the last email.

  • In the B2C space, it is common to conduct automated and sophisticated customized marketing to achieve greater connection with customers.
  • Today’s B2B SaaS marketers must think past systems and workflows and focus instead on value creation across their customer base. B2B SaaS Marketing.
  • Organizations need to focus on creating value at every step for each customer segment, they must strive to optimize their customer profiles so that they truly understand who their customers are and why they are or are not buying.
  • Once B2B SaaS Marketers can create comprehensive and sophisticated segmentation models for its customers the way B2C Marketers do, they will be able to create optimal buyer’s journeys that solves their customers’ problems.

What are typical misalignments between Marketing & Sales for B2B SaaS Companies and how could these be avoided?

    Misalignments between Marketing & Sales for B2B SaaS Companies are similar to those for all B2B Companies – Marketing and Sales working in silos, where Marketing programs are created without Sales input throughout the development process and Sales not including Marketing in key touchpoints with clients/prospects to help sharpen Marketing’s understanding of key buyer personas. The end-result is a disconnect between Marketing and Sales on SQL’s & ABM Campaign execution.
    Some ways to for companies to avoid these misalignments include:
  • Establishing a shared criteria for high-quality MQL’s/SQL’s
  • Based on Company Revenue Targets and historical SaaS Win Rates, determine the number of SQL’s needed in the Pipeline Annually that marketing will need to help drive through its programming
  • Investing in strong Sales Enablement Tools and CRM Platforms
  • Establishing Marketing Programs that nurture leads all the way through the Sales Funnel
  • Creating a clean handoff between Marketing and Sales (MQL to SQL)
  • Making sure Marketing and Sales are part of the development and execution of a consistent customer journey
  • Establishing consistent set of KPI’s

How do you see account-based marketing and it’s role in growing revenue evolving?

    Account Based Marketing has become increasingly critical as companies look to maximize the customer lifetime value of their existing clients and grow organically with them. Account Based Marketing provides Sales and Client Experience Teams with necessary sales enablement tools to leverage in nurturing cross-sell and upsell opportunities with their clients. At SKYGEN, our ABM Programs are informed by insights from the data we collect on our customer’s use of our SaaS Platform. We are able to identify usage patterns and needs from this data that leads to proactive recommendations we can bring forward in our ABM Campaigns additional product solutions.

How do you continue nurturing leads with multiple enterprise sales stakeholders from a marketing perspective?

    We rely heavily on our CRM Platform (Hubspot) for overall pipeline management. This includes lead-gen campaign execution, lead identification, nurturing campaign execution and lead conversion. Within the platform, it allows us to identify prospects, establish predictive lead scoring and prioritize outreach to these prospects based on winning potential. We leverage program engagement analytics provided by the platform along with inputs from our Sales & amp; CE Teams to determine our strategy for nurturing campaigns.

What is your marketing tech stack at SKYGEN?

  • CRM Platform – Hubspot
  • Website/CMS Platform – Drupal
  • Website Accessibility - Siteimprove
  • SEO Tools/Workflow – SEMRush
  • Project Management – Trello
  • Competitive & Market Intel – KLUE
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator

    B2B SaaS Marketing Teams should emulate B2C & Entertainment Brands by using data, analytics & machine learning/Ai to accurately target and market to potential customers with relevant, personalized content that addresses their specific paint points. Historically, B2B SaaS Marketing Organizations have not used data as a strategic resource and competitive advantage. Instead, they have driven their marketing efforts through rigid, sequential workflows. The focus has been on details like ensuring a phone call immediately follows an email or how to ensure a display ad follows a customer who opened the last email.

  • In the B2C space, it is common to conduct automated and sophisticated customized marketing to achieve greater connection with customers.
  • Today’s B2B SaaS marketers must think past systems and workflows and focus instead on value creation across their customer base. B2B SaaS Marketing.
  • Organizations need to focus on creating value at every step for each customer segment, they must strive to optimize their customer profiles so that they truly understand who their customers are and why they are or are not buying.
  • Once B2B SaaS Marketers can create comprehensive and sophisticated segmentation models for its customers the way B2C Marketers do, they will be able to create optimal buyer’s journeys that solves their customers’ problems.

    Misalignments between Marketing & Sales for B2B SaaS Companies are similar to those for all B2B Companies – Marketing and Sales working in silos, where Marketing programs are created without Sales input throughout the development process and Sales not including Marketing in key touchpoints with clients/prospects to help sharpen Marketing’s understanding of key buyer personas. The end-result is a disconnect between Marketing and Sales on SQL’s & ABM Campaign execution.
    Some ways to for companies to avoid these misalignments include:
  • Establishing a shared criteria for high-quality MQL’s/SQL’s
  • Based on Company Revenue Targets and historical SaaS Win Rates, determine the number of SQL’s needed in the Pipeline Annually that marketing will need to help drive through its programming
  • Investing in strong Sales Enablement Tools and CRM Platforms
  • Establishing Marketing Programs that nurture leads all the way through the Sales Funnel
  • Creating a clean handoff between Marketing and Sales (MQL to SQL)
  • Making sure Marketing and Sales are part of the development and execution of a consistent customer journey
  • Establishing consistent set of KPI’s

    Account Based Marketing has become increasingly critical as companies look to maximize the customer lifetime value of their existing clients and grow organically with them. Account Based Marketing provides Sales and Client Experience Teams with necessary sales enablement tools to leverage in nurturing cross-sell and upsell opportunities with their clients. At SKYGEN, our ABM Programs are informed by insights from the data we collect on our customer’s use of our SaaS Platform. We are able to identify usage patterns and needs from this data that leads to proactive recommendations we can bring forward in our ABM Campaigns additional product solutions.

    We rely heavily on our CRM Platform (Hubspot) for overall pipeline management. This includes lead-gen campaign execution, lead identification, nurturing campaign execution and lead conversion. Within the platform, it allows us to identify prospects, establish predictive lead scoring and prioritize outreach to these prospects based on winning potential. We leverage program engagement analytics provided by the platform along with inputs from our Sales & amp; CE Teams to determine our strategy for nurturing campaigns.

  • CRM Platform – Hubspot
  • Website/CMS Platform – Drupal
  • Website Accessibility - Siteimprove
  • SEO Tools/Workflow – SEMRush
  • Project Management – Trello
  • Competitive & Market Intel – KLUE
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator

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